Wednesday took an assortment of snack-food up to the cash register, and paid for that and their gas, changing his mind twice about whether he was doing it with plastic or with cash, to the irritation of the gum-chewing young lady behind the till. Shadow watched as Wednesday became increasingly flustered and apologetic. He seemed very old, suddenly. The girl gave him his cash back, and put the purchase on the card, and then gave him the card receipt and took his cash, then returned the cash and took a different card. Wednesday was obviously on the verge of tears, an old man made helpless by the implacable plastic march of the modern world.
Shadow checked out the payphone: an out-of-order sign hung on it.
They walked out of the warm gas station, and their breath steamed in the air.
“You want me to drive?” asked Shadow.
“Hell no,” said Wednesday.
The freeway slipped past them: browning grass meadows on each side of them. The trees were leafless and dead. Two black birds stared at them from a telegraph wire.
“Hey, Wednesday.”
“What?”
“The way I saw it in there, you never paid for the gas.”
“Oh?”
“The way I saw it, she wound up paying you for the privilege of having you in her gas station. You think she’s figured it out yet?”
“She never will.”
“So what are you? A two-bit con artist?”
Wednesday nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am. Among other things.”
He swung out into the left lane to pass a truck. The sky was a bleak and uniform gray.
“It’s going to snow,” said Shadow.
“Yes.”
“Sweeney. Did he actually show me how he did that trick with the gold coins?”
“Oh yes.”
“I can’t remember.”
“It’ll come back. It was a long night.”
Several small snowflakes brushed the windshield, melting in seconds.
“Your wife’s body is on display at Wendell’s Funeral Parlor at present,” said Wednesday. “Then after lunch they will take her from there to the graveyard for the interment.”
“How do you know?”
“I called ahead while you were in the john. You know where Wendell’s Funeral Parlor is?”
Shadow nodded. The snowflakes whirled and dizzied in front of them.
“This is our exit,” said Shadow. The car stole off the interstate, and past the cluster of motels to the north of Eagle Point.
Three years had passed. Yes. The Super-8 motel had gone, torn down: in its place was a Wendy’s. There were more stoplights, unfamiliar storefronts. They drove downtown. Shadow asked Wednesday to slow as they drove past the Muscle Farm. CLOSED INDEFINITELY, said the hand-lettered sign on the door, DUE TO BEREAVEMENT.
Left on Main Street. Past a new tattoo parlor and the Armed Forces Recruitment Center, then the Burger King, and, familiar and unchanged, Olsen’s Drug Store, and at last the yellow-brick facade of Wendell’s Funeral Parlor. A neon sign in the front window said HOUSE OF REST. Blank tombstones stood unchristened and uncarved in the window beneath the sign.
Wednesday pulled up in the parking lot.
“Do you want me to come in?” he asked.
“Not particularly.”
“Good.” The grin flashed, without humor. “There’s business I can be getting on with while you say your goodbyes. I’ll get rooms for us at the Motel America. Meet me there when you’re done.”
Shadow got out of the car, and watched it pull away. Then he walked in. The dimly lit corridor smelled of flowers and of furniture polish, with just the slightest tang of formaldehyde and rot beneath the surface. At the far end was the Chapel of Rest.
Shadow realized that he was palming the gold coin, moving it compulsively from a back palm to a front palm to a Downs palm, over and over. The weight was reassuring in his hand.
His wife’s name was on a sheet of paper beside the door at the far end of the corridor. He walked into the Chapel of Rest. Shadow knew most of the people in the room: Laura’s family, her workmates at the travel agency, several of her friends.
They all recognized him. He could see it in their faces. There were no smiles, though, no hellos.
At the end of the room was a small dais, and, on it, a cream-colored casket with several displays of flowers arranged about it: scarlets and yellows and whites and deep, bloody purples. He took a step forward. He could see Laura’s body from where he was standing. He did not want to walk forward; he did not dare to walk away.
A man in a dark suit—Shadow guessed he worked at the funeral home—said, “Sir? Would you like to sign the condolence and remembrance book?” and pointed him to a leather-bound book, open on a small lectern.
He wrote SHADOW and the date in his precise handwriting, then, slowly, he wrote (PUPPY) beside it, putting off walking toward the end of the room, where the people were, and the casket, and the thing in the cream casket that was no longer Laura.
A small woman walked in from the corridor, and hesitated. Her hair was a coppery red, and her clothes were expensive and very black. Widow’s weeds, thought Shadow, who knew her well: Audrey Burton, Robbie’s wife.
Audrey was holding a sprig of violets, wrapped at the base with silver foil. It was the kind of thing a child would make in June, thought Shadow. But violets were out of season.
Audrey looked directly at Shadow, and there was no recognition in her eyes. Then she walked across the room, to Laura’s casket. Shadow followed her.
Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest. She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper.
Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura’s chest. Then she pursed her blackberry-colored lips, worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura’s dead face.
The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear.
Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her. “Audrey?” he said. This time she recognized him. He wondered if she was taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached.
“Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?”
“Let me out yesterday. I’m a free man,” said Shadow. “What the hell was that all about?”
She stopped in the dark corridor. “The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together.”
“Not the violets.”
“Oh, that,” she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. “Well, I would have thought that was obvious.”
“Not to me, Audrey.”
“They didn’t tell you?” Her voice was calm, emotionless. “Your wife died with my husband’s cock in her mouth, Shadow.”
She turned away, walked out into the parking lot, and Shadow watched her leave.
He went back into the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit.
None of the people at the viewing were able to meet Shadow’s eye. Those who came over and talked to him did so as little as they could, mumbled awkward commiserations and fled.
After lunch—Shadow ate at the Burger King—was the burial. Laura’s cream-colored coffin was interred in the small non-denominational cemetery on the edge of town: unfenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.